


carve it out

by sparxwrites



Category: Borderlands, Tales from the Borderlands - Fandom
Genre: Amputation, Drugging, Electrocution, Medical Torture, Temporary Amnesia
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-05-17
Updated: 2015-05-17
Packaged: 2018-03-31 00:48:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,106
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3958165
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sparxwrites/pseuds/sparxwrites
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There was a loud, barking laugh, somewhere out of his line of vision. “Wow, they fucked your head up even more thoroughly than I thought!” A quiet snort of amusement, a few moments of hummed consideration, and then there was the sound of fingers snapping right by his ear. “Reece! That’s it. Or Reesy. Reezie? Something. Doesn’t really matter, I don’t actually care.”</p>
<p>(In which Vasquez is semi-competent in his attempts to capture Vaughn and Rhys, and Rhys is retrieved to Hyperion for... less than pleasant purposes.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	carve it out

**Author's Note:**

> i’ve fallen headfirst into the borderlands fandom, no backing out now. many thanks to depravityandsleaze over on tumblr for dragging me in, and for being so enthusiastic in talking to me about rhys getting wrecked.
> 
> **tw:** medical abuse, drugging, mind games, electrocution, vomiting, descriptions of surgery, and forced removal of prosthetics.

“Princess? You with me?” The voice was too loud, an echo inside his head that felt like sandpaper against every inch of his skull. “Hey, Hyperion to fucking- what’s your name again? Actually, y’know what, don’t even bother answering that. Just wake the fuck up, kid, okay? Seriously. You’ve been out of it  _forever_ , and you would not  _believe_ how bored I am.”

There was darkness, an endless, crushing weight of black that surrounded him like oil – it was suffocating, dragging him down despite his best attempts to fight through it, to ground himself, to find some frame of reference. Everything was a hazy smear, images floating just out of reach, the soft, buzzing whir of background noise too-loud in his ears. The vague heaviness of a body felt loosely attached to his consciousness, but it seemed reluctant to respond no matter how hard he tried to move.

_flashes of heat and dust, pandora, and vasquez with a gun that he’d pointed at the two of them and- “change of plan,” and a whine of charging power before the pain had hit, before he’d dropped to the floor and- hauled into a car, into the trunk, closeness and darkness all around and, “looks like you fucked up again, cupcake,” as jack flickered blue and glitching into view and-_

“Vaughn!” Rhys jolted forward,body responding all at once, eye snapping open in alarm before narrowing quickly against the painful brightness of the room he was in. Fluorescent strip lighting reflected off plain white walls, and the flare of it drove through him like a spike through his skull. “Fuck! Ahh-ah, ahh-”

He trailed off into gasping, dragging in shallow breaths through the throbbing ache that seemed to drive the breath from his lungs. It subsided slowly, too slowly, leaving him whining through a mouth he couldn’t seem to force closed, kept upright only by the straps across his torso and limbs that kept him pinned in place to the chair.

There was a loud, barking laugh, somewhere out of his line of vision. “Wow, they fucked your head up even more thoroughly than I thought!” A quiet snort of amusement, a few moments of hummed consideration, and then there was the sound of fingers snapping right by his ear. “Reece! That’s it. Or Reesy. Reezie? Something. Doesn’t really matter, I don’t actually care.”

Rhys startled, freezing against the chair when the motion pressed restraints sharply into his skin, tugged needles taped into his skin and attached to endless tubes and wires that ran out of sight. “H-hello?” he called, craning his head in the vain hope that there was someone nearby who could help. “Um, can- get- can someone get me out of… this?” The word for the straps pinning him still drifted somewhere just out of reach, brain still a soft haze.

His words were ignored, but there was more laughter that sent ice down his spine. “No one here but you and me, pumpkin. And Vaughn sold you out, remember?” The voice was low, rich, unpleasantly familiar. "Turned you in to save his own skin. Self-serving, sure, but you gotta admit it was effective. I like his style."

"No." Rhys shook his head desperately, stopping almost immediately when the motion made the pain in the back of his skull flare. Nausea gripped him for a moment, and he had to tilt his eyes up to the ceiling and _breathe_ until the pain faded and he no longer felt the urge to vomit. "No, Vaughn wouldn't- he'd never- wouldn't sell me out."

The ceiling was spinning, ever so slightly, just enough to make him dizzy as he fought to ground himself. His head was too heavy to hold up, and when his chin fell back against his chest, the floor was spinning too.

"Where am I?" he managed, tongue clumsy and lips tingling as the shuddering tightness in his stomach slowly uncoiled. The pattern of the hospital gown slowly stabilised before his eyes, small, pale-blue smears focusing into x’s across white. The pattern ran down his front and over his thighs, broken up by smears and blots of flaking red that made his stomach tighten up anew, stopping with the gown just above his knees. “Where-”

_white tile, stainless steel, red where there shouldn’t have been red, and it’d been spreading and- vasquez again, face too big in his vision, grinning wide and victorious and awful and- something had been missing, right at the edges, something had been wrong missing and he couldn’t work out what it was and- couldn’t work out where he was and-_

“Oh, for the love of-” Glitching static sparked blue at the corner of his eye, and he had to swing his head to see into the strange black spot in his sight. Jack was leant against a wall with his arms crossed, one eyebrow raised. “Are we going to have to do this _again_?”

“This? What- _this_ -? I- I don’t- what-” Rhys sucked in a sharp breath, lungs suddenly crushed and too-tight within his chest, chin dropping down further until it met the plastic straps across his shoulders that pinned him back in the chair. “I don’t-” Everything felt too-fast, too-much, fracturing static around the edges as he fought to get air into his starving lungs.

“They’ve got you on the good stuff again, then.” Jack snorted, shaking his head, tone laced with derision. “Relax, princess. You’ve been here for weeks, remember?”

Oddly enough, the words did nothing to calm Rhys. Another wave of panic washed over him, crushing his lungs and twisting his stomach until he was gulping air to fend off the blackness threatening the edge of his vision. The dark spot was still there, and he blinked, and blinked again, trying to get it to shift as he fought to catch his breath. “W- _weeks_?!”

_they hadn’t drugged him for the arm, it came off easily, a few clips and screws and unhooked wires and one of his limbs was gone, just gone, and gap where it was itched and clawed wrongness through his bones and- it hadn’t been enough and- they’d drugged him for the eye, world gone dark and when the light came back it had only come back in half, half light and half empty, burning pain and-_

Memory returned in a drowning rush. Rhys’ panic pushed through the drug-induced haze that had held back the thoughts and images clamouring for attention, and now they swamped him – a dizzying, horrifying whirlwind tour of the past… few weeks? Few months? There were so many holes, so many gaps and stretches of darkness, he couldn’t be sure.

Worst, though, were the memories directly after the gaps, of waking up and discovering pieces of himself missing, gone, _taken_.

The realisation of exactly _what_ the dark spot in his vision was had Rhys doubled over as best he could with the restraints, heaving breaths to try and stop gagging. Now he knew the eye was gone, he could feel the way the weight of his head was ever-so-slightly off, the way his eyelid hung loose over the empty socket.

“Ew.” Jack wrinkled his nose, lip pulled up as he reluctantly watched Rhys shake and gasp. “Please don’t throw up on yourself, that’s just… disgusting. Sort of pathetic, really. I don’t wanna see that shit.” He winced at a particularly violent heave, turning his eyes to the ceiling a second before he heard the sharp, hitching sound of Rhys’ retching. “Or you could ignore my brilliant advice, as usual.”

It was a small mercy Rhys’ stomach was empty – although it certainly didn’t feel it as he tasted bile at the back of his throat and his writhing insides failed to produce more than a dribble of liquid. It dripped down the front of his hospital gown as he gasped for breath. “O-oh- oh- oh my g-g-” he managed, chest heaving, entire body trembling. “G-g- _god_ -”

Heart hammering in his chest, blood roaring in his ears, he didn’t hear the beep of a machine behind him as one of the endless wires trailing from him detected his spiralling panic. Jack smirked, an expression also missed by Rhys in his panicked state, and then there were drips into his IV that rolled down the tubing and into his arm, and Rhys just… stopped.

The sedative hit heavily, turning his blood viscous and stopping the panic in its tracks as everything slowed to a crawl, his brain no longer functioning fast enough to process alarm. Drugged to the point that his body barely felt like it belonged to him, Rhys stayed upright only due to the restraints, Jack’s voice a distant irritation that hardly seemed real.

Eventually, even that stopped. Rhys was left to silence – to the quiet, buzzing hum that might have been the rows of machines just out of sight, or might have been the slow whirr of his brain.

An indeterminate time later, there was different noise. Footsteps and the sound of voices intruded on the quiet. A door opened, something he vaguely registered through the drug-haze of cotton wool wrapped around his head, and the footsteps and voices came closer and closer until a pair of shoes stopped in his line of vision, someone tutting disapprovingly somewhere above him.

“Oh, jeez, how much did you give him?” Lips twisting in distaste, Vasquez tugged Rhys’ head up by his chin, sighing at the bound man’s blown-wide pupil and unfocused gaze. “He’s basically a vegetable. I mean, not that it’s not funny…” He let go of Rhys’ chin to pat his cheek harder than strictly necessary, lips quirking up when Rhys struggled briefly to hold his head up without the support before letting his chin drop back against his chest. “Heh. But he’s no good to us if his brain gets fried, you understand me?”

The doctor at his side nodded, a small head-bob as she noted something down on a clipboard. “Yes, sir,” she agreed, with the calm, practiced air of someone who had a lot of experience agreeing with higher-ups. “Ah… apparently he was dosed a few minutes ago, sensors picked up stress and an elevated heart rate and responded to that. Evidently the dosage is too high, we’ll take it down a little.”

“You’d better,” said Vasquez, his tone pleasant but his smile threatening, filled with too many teeth. “If he gets damaged badly enough we can’t get that AI out of him, then I’ll be holding all of you _personally_ responsible.”

There was a palpable shift in the atmosphere of the room. The organised, businesslike shuffling paused for a moment, and when it resumed it was with an air of nervousness that bordered on fear. Rumours of exactly how Vasquez had acquired his current position had spread far and wide, and none of them wanted to find out whether incurring Vasquez’s displeasure would make them share the fate of his predecessor.

Vasquez noticed, and sighed irritably, pinching the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger as he scowled. “Look, just- get that thing out of his head, okay? We _need_ that AI, just get it the fuck out and then you can do whatever the hell you want with him, I don’t care.” He flapped a dismissive hand at the doctor still hovering near him, casting Rhys one last faintly disgusted look before turning on his heel.

Jack hissed out air through his teeth, before whistling lowly, eyes narrowed and fixed on Vasquez’s form as he prowled out the room. “Never thought I’d say this, princess,” he said, resting a hand on Rhys’ shoulder – a gesture that would have been comforting if Rhys could feel it past a slight prickle of static.“But your head is looking like an increasingly good place to be. At least _you_ don’t have delusions of grandeur.”

Jack grinned, leaning in to whisper in Rhys’ ear, a weirdly intimate action that left Rhys shivering despite the lack of touch or breath against his skin. “I like that about you, kid. You’re _subservient_. You know your place.”

His last words were little more than noises for Rhys, though, as was the laughter that echoed before he flickered and vanished. The doctor tilting his chin up, carefully strapping his head against the chair in a way that didn’t obscure his port, was of rather more concern. Hands lifted his head, pinned it back against the headrest of the chair, and rubber-covered steel clamped into place over his cheeks and chin and forehead despite his garbled protests.

“Oh, god, please-” whined Rhys, desperately, finally managing to force slurred words out with an uncooperative tongue. His eye was wide, the rest of him totally immobilised other than the heaving of his chest, the frantic curling and uncurling of his fingers. “P-please, don’t- d-d-don’t do this- d-don’t- please, god, _please_ -”

He choked on his words in his panic, coughing helplessly as one of the surgeons touched cool, latex-covered fingers against his temple. They moved in a circle around the port, pressing lightly on the circle of metal embedded in his skull, and Rhys’ breathing hitched at the spike of sensation. “Don’t-” he managed, eye squeezed shut and entire face twisted as he braced for the coming pain. “Just- knock me out or something- _please_ -”

The surgeon hummed quietly, and he felt the brush of a pen of some kind against his skin, marking dots and lines as guides for slicing him open. “This is a delicate procedure, and we need you awake for it,” they said, voice, no hint of sympathy in their voice. “We’ll be cutting in quite near to the brain, and disturbing a lot of electronics actually implanted into it, so we need you awake to monitor basic brain functions and responses. The drug cocktail you’re on means you won’t remember anything.”

Rhys’ laughter was shrill, abrupt and high pitched and hysterical. “I won’t- oh, oh, that’s- that’s fine then-” he managed, before his words stuck in his throat, overridden by his gasping as he struggled to breathe, struggled to fight against the drug that made his limbs heavy and every word an effort.

“Ooo, they’re taking the port out this time.” Jack flickered back into view, sitting atop the cart of medical medical supplies and watching the doctor draw careful marks on Rhys’ face with a critical eye. “All this to find little old me – I’d be flattered if it wasn’t so _weird_ watching them cut out all your cybernetics out piece by piece.” He laughed at the way the remaining blood drained from Rhys’ face at the words, shaking his head. “Oh, kid, you are a _blast_ to wind up, you really are.”

An arm passed right through him as one of the doctors reached for a scalpel, and Jack tore his attention away from Rhys long enough to pull a face at her. “Excuse me, do you mind?” he asked, huffing offended boredom and turning back to Rhys when she didn’t reply.

“Anyway, they’re not going to find me in that port, even when they rip it out of you. You want to know why?” He leaned forward, balancing elbows on his knees and resting his chin on his hands. “Ask me why, pumpkin.”

“W-why?” managed Rhys, voice rasping and hitching through the frantic, panicked breaths he was drawing in – attention completely on Jack, unaware of the way the surgeons had paused at the word, looking at one another.

Grinning, Jack hopped off the cart. “Because I’m not in the port, sweetheart, am I? Just like I wasn’t in your arm, or your eye… No.” He straddled Rhys easily, legs phasing through Rhys’ arms and the sides of the chair as he settled himself on the other man’s lap. “You wanna know where I am, princess?” he asked, leaning in close enough their noses almost touched, close enough Rhys could have felt a real person’s breath on his face. “Do you?”

Rhys tried to shake his head, and only succeeded in pressing the restraints further into his cheeks. Jack’s grin widened, full of teeth and malice as Rhys sucked in a stuttering breath. “I’m _inside_ of you, sweetheart.” One flickering blue hand reached up to cup Rhys’ cheek, and the finger that brushed over his port was enough to make Rhys flinch against the restraints, choke at the flare of electric pain through his skull. “Not there. _Here_.”

The hand sunk into Rhys’ skull before he could process what was happening, blue light through the circle of his port and inwards – pushing through until it brushed the wiring at the back that hooked up to his brain, a hundred small electrodes scattered across the inside of his skull. Jack cackled as Rhys went rigid against the chair, wiggling his fingers.

“Inside of you, kid!” he crowed, delightedly, teeth bared victoriously as Rhys’ pupil shrank to a pinprick and his face went grey. “They can’t cut me out!” There was a manic light to his eyes, a deranged glee written across his face as he shoved his hand another inch further into Rhys’ skull.

Rhys was still for only a moment before the lightning down his spine released in a sharp, convulsive spasm, all his muscles contracting at once, and he _screamed_. He screamed and screamed until his ears rung with it, until the pain of his spine curving and his limbs pressed against the restraints faded into the pain of the electric claws sunk into his flesh, until the breath in his chest ran out – until the white-blue blaze behind his eyelids was replaced by a blissfully silent dark.

After a long moment, Jack pulled his hand out, breaking contact with the port with a small crackle and the slight smell of scorched flesh. “There you go, kid,” he said, quietly, patting Rhys’ cheek as the doctors jolted into panicked movement, all thoughts of surgery gone. Shudders still worked their way through Rhys’ limbs from the aftershocks of electricity still sparking through his brain, chest rising and falling in broken hitches as he struggled to breathe. “There you go.”

Standing up, he brushed imaginary dust off his thighs with a sigh. “Well, on the bright side, doesn’t look like they’re going to slice your head open any time soon.” He watched Rhys twitch – eye rolled into the back of his head as the surgeons manhandled some of the restraints undone, pushed more needles under his skin and hooked him up to more wires and tubes – with an expression that could have been described as fond, if not for all the _teeth_. “Never say I did nothing for you, sweetheart.”


End file.
